The Iron Gates

by Margaret Millar

  “They aren’t.”

  She gave a tight little smile. “Nice to know. Anyway, I haven’t any reason for being here, I haven’t anything to tell you. I guess—well, I wanted someone to talk to.”

  “Normal.”

  “It is? Most people would say it’s very abnormal to be dashing around town on the morning of your stepmother’s funeral. Especially after the way she died. Dr. Goodrich said it’s humanly impossible for anyone to scale that fence. Yet she did it.” She bit her underlip. “Isn’t that just like Lucille? A surprise to the very end. Not one of us really knew a damn thing about her because she didn’t talk about herself. How can you know anything about a person without the evidence of her own words? And even then . . .”

  “Yes, even then,” Sands said.

  “What a mess.” She stared moodily at a corner of the desk. “What a filthy mess.”

  “You sound as if you’re about to say, what have I done to deserve all this?”

  “Well, I do say it. What have I?”

  “I wouldn’t know. But if you’re looking for any system of logic in this world, in terms of human justice, you’re younger than I thought.”

  “Twenty-five. But I’ve never been young.”

  “Women are notoriously fond of that cliche,” Sands said. “Possibly there’s some truth in it. Girls are usually held more responsible for their behavior than boys, and any sort of responsibility is aging.”

  Perhaps mine most of all, he thought. The collection of an eye for an eye. A mind for a mind.

  She raised her head and looked at him. “You’ve changed quite a bit since I saw you years ago.”

  “So have you. And what have we done to deserve all this?”

  He smiled but she continued to regard him soberly. “I really meant that.”

  “I know you did. Charming.”

  She began to put on her gloves. “I guess I’m just wasting your time, I’d better be going. You don’t take me seriously.”

  “I don’t take you seriously?” He raised his eyebrows. “Four people dead and I don’t take you seriously? It’s four now. The grand total. As you say, this must be the end of it. The finale—the climbing of a fence that can’t be climbed, smash, bang, zowie.”

  “You needn’t . . .”

  “No, I needn’t, but I will. She died a hideous death and one of you is responsible. You, or your father, or your brother, or your aunt. It’s that simple, and that complicated. She wasn’t killed cleanly, she was hounded to death. As by-products, there were two other deaths.”

  “You make us out a lovely family,” she said dully. “Perfectly lovely. I’ll be going now. Thanks for cheering me up, you and the calla lilies.”

  “It’s not my business to cheer you up. Lieutenant Frome is at the Ford Hotel.”

  “What of it?”

  “He seems a pleasant young man, though a little distraught. Having girl trouble. Once he’s overseas I expect he’ll forget about it.”

  She rose, drawing her coat close around her. “I’ve sent him back his ring. It would be useless to drag him into this mess. As you were kind enough to point out, it’s a family, matter and we’ll keep it in the family.”

  “Why not let him decide that?”

  “I make my own decisions and always have.”

  “Oh, sure. You have what is known as a lot of character, meaning you can be wrong at the top of your lungs.” He got up and held out his hand to her across the desk. “Well, good-bye. It was nice seeing you.”

  She ignored his hand, recognizing the gesture as ironic. “Good-bye.”’

  “See you at the funeral.”

  She paused on the way to the door and turned around. “Must you come?”

  “Hell, I like funerals. I like to give my clients a good send-off. I’m having a wreath made: Happy Landing, Lucille.”

  Her face began to crumple and she put out one hand as if to balance herself. “I have never—met—a more inhuman man.”

  “Inhuman?” He walked toward her slowly. “Do you realize that not one of you has given me a scrap of information to help me solve these murders? I might have saved Cora Green and your stepmother, and Eddy Greeley.”

  “Two insane people,” she said in a bitter voice. “And a dope fiend. It was practically euthanasia. They were all old and hopeless. It’s the young ones, Martin and me, who have to live on and suffer and never be able to forget or lead happy normal lives. It was Martin and me who had to live without a real mother. It was I who had to give up the only person I’ve ever really loved because I couldn’t bear to have him disgraced too. Officers in the army can’t afford to get mixed up in a scandal.”

  “That’s his business.”

  “No, it’s mine. If he lost his commission, all through our marriage every time we quarreled he would fling it up to me.”

  “If he’s the flinging-up type he won’t need any excuse.”

  “I didn’t say he was that type! He isn’t!”

  “What you’re saying is, that’s what you’d do if you were he. Well, I’m not Dorothy Dix, I don’t give a damn what you do as long as it doesn’t come under homicide.”

  He thought she was on the verge of walking out and slamming the door. Instead she went back and sat down and took off her gloves again.

  “All right,” she said calmly. “What can I do to help you find out the truth?” .

  “Talk.”

  “About what?”

  “It was on a Sunday, wasn’t it, that you and your father and brother went to get Lieutenant Frome. And on Monday your stepmother ran away. Tell me everything that happened on those two days, what was said and who said it, even the most trivial things.”

  “I don’t see how that will help.”

  “I do. Up to that point you were a fairly normal family group. You had made the adjustments to your real mother’s death, and were living along with the normal trivial quarrels and jokes and affection . . .”

  “That’s not true. Not for me, anyway. I never adjusted to my mother’s death and I had no affection for Lucille. I have never forgiven my father for marrying again.”

  “In any case you managed to live with her, like the rest, and even found her useful and competent sometimes, perhaps?”

  “Yes.”

  “What I’m getting at is that something must have happened on that Sunday to precipitate matters. It doesn’t look to me as if someone had been brooding for years about sending Lucille an amputated finger and waiting for a convenient train wreck. No, I think that on Sunday someone received a revelation, and the wreck itself suggested a means of getting back at Lucille.”

  “That leaves Edith out. She was at home.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that Sunday was just the same as other Sundays. I got up the same time as I always do and was the first one down for breakfast. Is that the sort of thing you want to hear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Annie gave me orange juice and toast and coffee. The other maid, Della, was at church. Then Edith came down. She was a little fluttery about Giles coming and I remember she kept saying ‘today of all days,’ which annoyed me. I don’t like fusses.”

  She paused, frowning thoughtfully down at her hands. “Oh, yes. Then father couldn’t find something, as usual, and I heard Lucille talking up the stairs to him in the way she had—as if the rest of us were a bunch of children and she the well-trained nursemaid. She said something about trying the cedar closet and then she came in and had breakfast, and she and Edith talked. I expect Edith said the usual things to me, about my manners and my posture—she always did. After that Edith went up to get Martin and he came down and began to kid me about Giles. As soon as Martin came in Lucille left. I remember that because it was so pointed.”

  “Pointed?”

  “Yes. Now that father and Edith weren’t there she didn’t have to put up with us and our chatter, she could get up and leave. When father was there she was all sweet and silky. No, I’m not being imaginative, either. You should h
ave seen her face when I told her I was getting married. She positively beamed. One out, two to go, see? Perhaps Martin would get married too, and Edith might die, and then she could be alone with father. That’s what she wanted. She never fooled Martin and me for an instant—even before . . .”

  She stopped.

  “Even before your mother died?” Sands said.

  “Yes. Even then. She could hide it in front of grownups but not in front of us. Not that we were so perceptive and subtle, but because adults are so stupid about hiding things from children. They overdo it and you can smell the corn miles away. Well, that’s why we didn’t like her—because she was in love with my father. And she—stayed that way.”

  “And he?”

  “Oh, he loved her,” she said grudgingly. “Not in the same way that he loved my mother—Lucille was so different from her. Father always had to look after Mildred, but when he married Lucille she was the one who looked after him. She and Edith. Poor Father.”

  “Why poor?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Because—well, I guess not many people understand my father. He’s a very good doctor, there’s no better gynecologist in the city. All day and half the night he’d be at his office or one of the hospitals or making his calls—very skillful and authoritative and all that—and then he’d come home and be gently and unobtrusively forced into taking aspirins and lying down for a rest and eating the right food. Sort of a schizophrenic existence. And all through it he’s remained good-natured and kind and—well, a good egg. A couple of years ago Edith and Lucille pressed him into retiring from full practice. Maybe they were right, I don’t know. He’s never had very good health and a doctor’s life is a hard one. Still—it’s a thing for a man to settle by himself.”

  “Like marriage.”

  She flushed and said coldly, “That’s different.”

  “All domineering women resent domineering women.”

  “A directly domineering woman is one thing, a sly managing female is another.”

  “Very feministic.”

  “And I didn’t come here to argue.”

  “Then back to Sunday.”

  “I’ve told you everything. It was the most ordinary day in the world until we ran into the train wreck. From then on it became very confused. We all worked steadily until late that night. I hardly saw any of the others. I helped undress and wash the wounded and make beds and things like that. I haven’t had much real hospital training, that’s all I could do. I took time off to phone home because I knew Edith would be worried.” Again the grudging note in her voice. “Lucille, too, I suppose, though not about us. That’s really all I can tell you.”

  She got up, a stocky, healthy-looking girl with a direct and somewhat defiant gaze.

  “I’ve talked too much,” she said curtly, pulling on her gloves.

  “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “I—I’d rather you didn’t tell the others I came here this morning. They wouldn’t like it.” She raised her head proudly. “Not that I’m in the least frightened.”

  “It might be wise to be a little frightened.”

  “If I admitted, in words, that I was even a little frightened, I’d never go home again.”

  She went out, the echo of her own words ringing in her ears: never go home again, never go home again.

  But she could not resist a challenge, especially one that she presented to herself. And so she drove straight home.

  She let herself in with her own key. As soon as the door opened she could smell the flowers, the heavy cloying calla lilies and the poisonously sweet carnations. Funeral flowers.

  With Deepest Condolences—With Sincerest Sorrow.

  Please omit flowers, the notice in the paper had read. But some of their friends thought a funeral just wasn’t a funeral without flowers. And so they kept arriving by personal messengers and florist vans, to be unwrapped by Annie, and stacked up haphazardly in the living room by a distraught and red-eyed Edith.

  “Idiots,” Polly said through clenched teeth. “Idiots, idiots.”

  Edith came out of the living room. She looked old and tragic and she kept pressing one hand to her head as if to press away the pain.

  “I’m so tired. I don’t know what to do with all these flowers.”

  “Throw them out.”

  “It wouldn’t look right. Someone might see us. It seems so silly, sending flowers when she isn’t even here.” Her words ended in a sob. “I have this blinding headache, I can’t seem to think.”

  “Ask Father to give you something.”

  “No, I can’t bother him. He didn’t sleep all night.” The front door opened and Martin came in. A blast of cold air swept down the hall.

  “Hello,” Martin said cheerfully. “You’ve been out, Polly?”

  Edith turned away and went quickly up the stairs without speaking to him.

  Martin frowned at her back. “What’s the matter with her lately? As soon as I come she goes.”

  “You get on her nerves, which doesn’t surprise me. Give me a cigarette.”

  He tossed a package of cigarettes toward her. “Well, why do I get on her nerves?”

  “Respect for the dead. That sort of thing.”

  “She’s been doing this for two weeks. Lucille wasn’t dead two weeks ago.”

  “If you’re worried, why not ask her?”

  “No, thanks. My policy is to stay away from the rest of the family as much as I can.”

  “Mine too,” Polly said dryly. “And isn’t that a coincidence?”

  Martin looked at her with detachment. “Pretty long in the tooth and claw this morning, aren’t you? Where have you been?”

  “Here and there.”

  “Well, well.” He looked amused but she could tell from the way his eyes narrowed that he was angry. “I don’t seem to be much of a success with the ladies today. One walks out, the other shuts up.”

  “It’s just pure envy. We’d like to be able to bury ourselves in books too.”

  “My work has to be done.”

  “Come hell or high water. You’ve made that clear.”

  “Oh, Lord.” He put his hand out and caught her arm and smiled suddenly. “Look, there’s no sense in the two of us fighting. We’re the ones that have to stick together—aren’t we?”

  For a minute she couldn’t speak. She felt the tenseness in his voice and in his eyes, crinkled at the corners with smiling lines, yet cold because they were always turned in upon himself.

  “Oh, sure,” she said calmly, and shrugged away his hand. “We’ll all stick together. There’s not much else we can do.”

  “I’ll be away this afternoon,” Janet Green told her secretary. “See that these are ready for me in the morning and that Miss Lance gets the samples, and . . .” Her eyes settled vacantly on the desk. “Oh, that’s all.” The secretary picked up the samples, frowning. Miss Green had been very absent-minded for the past few days. She was always forgetting things and breaking off sentences in the middle. In the secretary’s opinion, Miss Green had been working too hard and should have had a holiday after the death of her sister.

  As she passed across the front of the desk she gave Miss Green a sharp glance. Janet caught it.

  “Damn,” she muttered when the door closed. “I’ll have to keep my mind on business. I shouldn’t go there this afternoon. It's not my affair.”

  But it is, she answered herself silently. I have every right to go to her funeral; Cora died because of her.

  Since she had read of Lucille’s suicide in the paper, Janet’s conscience had been troubling her. She felt that she had not done enough to help Lucille and that she was, in a sense, responsible for what happened. Twice she had begun to call Sands on the telephone seeking reassurance and explanations, but each time she had hung up again. Then the urge had seized her to go and see the Morrow family. She felt vaguely that once she had seen them, things would be clearer and the whole “business less mysterious and frightening.

  Since she did not
want an actual encounter with the family she decided to go to the cemetery where Lucille was to be buried. There would be a crowd of curiosity-seekers there; no one would notice her.

  But Janet’s hope of remaining unnoticed was dispelled almost as soon as she arrived. Bad weather had kept most of the curiosity-seekers away; and to make it worse, she arrived late and the first person she saw was Sands.

  He was standing apart from the little group of people clustered around the open grave. He had his hat off and the driving snow had whitened his hair/ She began to walk around to the other side, conscious of the crunching noise her feet made in the snow.

  He heard it, and looked up and nodded at her.

  Janet hesitated and stood still. What bad taste to come here, she thought, what idiocy. If I could only get away quietly . . .

  But it was too late, she couldn’t get away. The minister was praying, and one of the group around the grave had turned around and was looking at her. It was an older woman, heavily draped in black, with a pale pinched face and dark tired eyes which said, without anger, without bitterness: What are you doing here? Leave us alone.

  Ashes to ashes.

  “Edith Morrow,” Sands’ voice said in her ear. Janet jumped. She hadn’t heard him approaching and there was something sinister in the way he said, “Edith Morrow.”

  Dust to dust.

  “Dr. Morrow’s sister,” Sands said. “Why did you come?”

  “I wanted to see the Morrows.”

  “Well, there they are. Standing together, as usual. They do it well.”

  As if to disprove his statement, Edith Morrow turned and began walking toward them.

  “You have no right to be here,” she said to Sands in her high desperate voice. “Trailing us even to the grave—despicable . . .” She made a nervous gesture with one black-gloved hand. “And these others—why did they come? Why can’t they leave us alone?”

  “This is Miss Green,” Sands said quietly. “Cora Green’s sister.”

  “C—Cora Green . . .?”

  Janet flushed. “I agree, I shouldn’t have come. I’ll leave immediately.”

  “It’s all over anyway,” Edith said harshly.